Diary Entry: R-Day, Part 2

It’s late in the afternoon. I’m supposed to meet the investment banker and his group so that I can be taken to the General’s operations center somewhere up in the mountains. Meanwhile, I continue to scan the skies. No rain. No sign of promising cloud development. It seems clear, seven hours into the 24-hour event window, that nothing is happening. This meeting with the weather modification folks should be interesting.

On the way to the rendezvous point, I start thinking. I’m about to get picked up by a group of people I don’t know and be driven at sunset into the mountains of West Texas, where we’ll visit the camp of an ex-military man (the “General”) and his assistants, who, it now seems clear, are not at all succeeding in their claim to be able to produce 4”-5” of rain, as has been promised.

What if this has all been a scam? What if they’ve been leading the investors along, collecting money and hoping that they never find out? What if now they realize the gig is up? What if there’s an angry confrontation at this operations center in the mountains? What if there’s no operations center at all, and the site has been chosen by the scam artists as a perfect, quiet ambush location? It may take years to find the bodies. And here I am, voluntarily being carried off into the wilderness to meet a group of people whom I have reason not to trust!

The more I think about it, the more I start believing that visiting the operations site is not such a good idea. I decide that when the rest of them show up, I’ll make the excuse that it’s getting late and I prefer to just drive back to my hotel room rather than visiting the operations center.

The minutes drag on. Eventually, sun sets, and I decide I don’t even want to be waiting in the dark at a lonely highway intersection. I call the investment banker group, and tell them, to their disappointment, that I’m heading back. They’re about 20 minutes out. I try to tell them that we can stop and say hi as we pass along the road, but the road dips and I lose cell contact with them.

I drive back to town, looking for the vehicle with the investors. The only one that I pass during the proper time window is a motor home. I flash my lights and slow down, but there’s no response.

I’m comfortable with my decision, but still on edge. I recall that they made it a point to find out which hotel I was staying at. Suppose my suspicions are correct, and the investors are in for an ambush? The scammers would want to leave no witnesses. Apparently, I’m the only person who knows that they were supposed to meet. Won’t the scammers come after me, too?

I call the investment bankers, and get voicemail. I leave a voicemail message asking them to PLEASE call me as soon as they can, at any hour of the night, to update me on the status of the weather modification activities. If they call, and say everything’s OK, I can rest easy. But if they never call…

I decide that I really don’t want to spend the night in my hotel room waiting for a phone call, precisely where the scammers expect me to be. So I drive around town, looking for a good inconspicuous place to sit in my car and nap. Truck stop: no good. Hospital: no good. Neighborhood: too suspicious. Eventually I decide to wait in the parking lot of my own hotel. (They’d never expect me to be hiding there, right?) I back into a spot off to the side with a good view of the entrance, tilt my seat back, and try to fall asleep.

Around 1:30 AM my email buzzes me. It’s a message from the investment bankers. They report that they have talked to the General, that according to him everything looks fine. I email back, thanking them for the update, and make my way upstairs, grateful that my suspicions were wrong and looking forward to what’s left of a good night’s sleep.

One Response

I suspect that this is more a case of a group that has been led astray by confirmation bias rather than a scam. Your greatest dnger is having to repeat a thousand time the explanation of why their method hasn’t been proven, not in re-enacting Deliverance.